At a key point in ``Foreign Student,'' a look back in sorrow at a semester of happiness on a rural Virginia campus in the '50s, a professor reads a long passage from ``The Great Gatsby,'' followed by a Lord Byron poem.

While Byron's ``When We Two Parted'' plays a vital part in this tale of the forbidden love between a Parisian in America and a beautiful older black woman, Eva Sereny's adaptation of a roman a clef by Philippe Labro feels much more like a French revision of F. Scott Fitzgerald than a hymn to the Romantic Era.

Fitzgerald, though born far too early to interest himself in interracial romances, was at his best in love stories about relationships doomed by class differences -- from ``Gatsby'' to ``Winter Dreams.'' Football heroes -- notably the field goal kicker -- also loomed large in his romantic reveries. And, a bit surprisingly, ``Foreign Student'' gives its soccer-playing Frenchman a moment of glory as an American football hero.

Sereny's first film, a multinational effort filmed on location in Paris and on various campuses in the Potomac Valley, proves both appealing and a little troubling. As written for the screen by Menno Meyjes, who also adapted Alice Walker's ``The Color Purple'' for Steven Spielberg, ``Foreign Student'' seems awkward at times, both in its fairy-tale conception of its heroine, the beautiful, tragic and infinitely giving April, and in its portrait of the juke joint visited by its young and foolish Parisian hero, Phillippe Le Clerc -- a place bristling with hostility and flashing with the occasional switchblade. Still, it is difficult to resist the pairing of Germany's Marco Hofschneider (``Europa, Europa''), here sporting a persuasive French accent, and Robin Givens, who is evolving into a screen icon as well as a fine actress.

``Foreign Student'' opens with a brief glimpse of Hofschneider's slim, small Phillippe doing his stuff on a Parisian soccer field. Then he is summoned to be informed that he has won a priceless experience: a semester at an American university. This brief beginning sets in motion both the film's theme -- the too- quick flight of precious, yet carelessly handled time -- and the recurring sports motif.

The film then cuts to a train chugging through the Virginia countryside, and the production's troubles begin. There is little sense of reality in having a couple of antique passenger cars in an era when railroads ruled the South. Nor is the rural station, also antique, terribly convincing as it seems too deserted. The restored '50s automobiles glimpsed as Phillippe treks to the fictitious Ashland-Stuart University impart a stagey look, too. And the groupings of coeds on campus as Phillippe makes his entrance also seem posed and artificial.

Sereny is Hungarian-born and English-educated; Meyjes was born in the Netherlands, and educated there, in England, and in San Francisco, while the director of photography, Franco di Giacomo has worked mostly in his native Italy. (The production company is owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the premier of Italy.) The combination creates a less than persuasive picture of America in 1956. Because of limited budgets, the real interiors have a murky look, and camera setups seem to have been devised in haste.

Even some of the actors seem out of their element. Jack Coleman, who plays the literary type who reads Gatsby and Byron, doesn't appear to be comfortable in the home where he gives seminars that ought to be more clubby. And Edward Herrmann seems too ponderous and actorish as the campus eminence gris.

The younger players work better, with Rick Johnson setting out a convincing hotshot quarterback from a family of drunks and Charlotte Ross shifting through personae as a maladjusted student from Boston. And the cute and boyish Hofschneider and the beautiful, womanly Givens make a striking pair of star-crossed lovers.

The biggest treats, however, are Charles S. Dutton and Hinton Battle as visiting rhythm-and-blues stars jamming at the jook, while jazzman Jon Hendricks has a small but all- important, non-musical role as a railroad porter. Except for the juke joint episode, and some moments of ``Sh-Boom'' and the Platters, however, the often-synthesized score by Jean-Claude Petit is totally out of joint with the times.

Rated R, this film contains some rude talk, a graphic but relatively discreet depiction of love in a railroad shanty, and some well-meaning naive racial stereotypes.